It is bullshit. Law professors, like other kinds of professors, mostly live in a vacuum of unreality, actually doing very little. Their world view comes down to: I don't understand why everyone can't function the way we do here in Berkeley, Madison, Cambridge, Hyde Park, etc.

That's not to say that law professors don't perform a vital social function. They do. That's also not a slam on you, Althouse. You are out there, in the arena, at least relatively.

But please, don't allow your peers to collectively call themselves cosmopolitan and well-educated. It's quite the reverse: their lives are merely overly easy, and their view of the world is narrow and highly parochial.

The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth.

The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents.

Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House.

Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.

The cumulative effect of these partisan differences is enormous.

If the pattern of income growth under postwar Republican presidents had matched the pattern under Democrats, incomes would be more equal now than they were in 1950 — a far cry from the contemporary reality of what some observers are calling a New Gilded Age.

Wait that's a false "debunking." Leiter says "educated people lean Democrat" and Bainbridge counters with "Republicans have more education." Both statements could be true (and I believe both statements to be true). How to reconcile the two statements is an exercise left to the reader.

Rasmussen recently reported:While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

They give more because they are anti-American Marxists and are eager to destroy this once-great country, which can become again what it once was before Michelle was proud of it and Barry started smoking again.

atest breaking news: the american public neither knows nor cares what law professors, and their spawn, lawyers, think.. If you are operating under any such illusions, think again. do you not understand that lawyers are viewed only slightly lower on the evolutionary scale than pond scum? If not, you need to see your therapists

Actually, I think Leiter is correct, and Bainbridge's comments don't really refute his point. Rather, they make a different point, just as 7M and several other commenters do; that Leiter's implicit point - cosmopolitan, well-educated people ("well educated" in this context meaning holding a postgraduate degree of some sort) are smarter than people who aren't - is nonsense. Unless you're doing some sort of practical research or teaching a vocational/technical subject, being a professor requires familiarity with information, not application of knowledge, which is a much more accurate measure of intelligence. That's not to say many professors aren't brilliant; just that that credential doesn't establish it.

"I am very well shielded from market forces... other than the marketplace of ideas"

I'd disagree that, as a university professor, you aren't shielded from the marketplace of ideas. The fact that you venture out from behind that shield doesn't mean it isn't there.

Wait that's a false "debunking." Leiter says "educated people lean Democrat" and Bainbridge counters with "Republicans have more education." Both statements could be true

High school graduates, people with some college, and college graduates lean Republican. High school dropouts and people with graduate degrees lean Democrat. The total population of "people with at least a high school degree" leans Republican, as does the total population of "people with college degrees". The only way Leiter's statement holds true is if you consider anyone with less than a Master's degree to be "uneducated".

Their concept of the "marketplace of ideas" is lockstep socialism. Agree or leave. Capitalism? What is that? A more bigoted workplace would be hard to find - anti-white, anti-success, anti-everything except their little corner of the world.

See the Duke rape hoax scandal for more information on the hatred the ivory tower houses.

I have several degrees to my name, I consider myself "cosmopolitan", which I think means you've eaten in a Vietnamese restaurant, and I've never belonged to any political party. Really intelligent people don't like to hitch their intellectual horses to the square-wheeled cart of political parties.

I think a lot of professors are Democrats because both groups think that someone else should support them so they have time to express themselves. Let's face it, academia is like a politburo. You're given a cushy job for as long as you are able to serve the interests of the "party". Your main occupations are indoctrinating young people for the party and playing political games in order to save your ass when it's time to cull the herd.

Every professor I ever had in college was a complete and utter fool. Without exception. Well one exception. There was this one old accounting professor who was a holocaust survivor who would mutter Yiddish curses under his breath at the stupid answers his students gave to simple questions. That guy knew the score. The rest of them couldn’t pour piss out of a boot. And the all of them had more degrees than Andrew Sullivan’s extra long rectal thermometer.

My law professors, with rare exception, struck me as dullard-types that could hardly be called "cosmopolitan". What a laugh!

There were two or three very Republican profs who no doubt gave some money to someone at some level, and a somewhat larger (but still not huge) group of vocally Democrat-partisan profs that likely did the same.

No one was really concealing anything, in my (limited, anecdotal) experience, though.

Because their mums told them to. And their mums were the ones who put them through school. It's all very narrowly insular and not at all broad and cosmopolitan as imagined .

O wait. I must remember to continuously stroke the egos of my Liberal friends. Here. It's because they're so much smarter and because their understanding of the world is so much more thorough. And compassionate. That too. And socially involved. And power. It's about supporting the right kind of power. Good power. All of that socially responsible stuff, it's a form of tithing to Liberals.

Don't know so much about professors, but the Liberals I know involved in law, come to think of it, they're all Liberal, drink heavily. Even the women. Drink me right under the table. I'm loathe to admit that but I am in the habit of watching my drinking lest I feel compelled by emotional but otherwise vapid speeches to go off writing checks to a political party.

" ...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."

What about areas of study other than law? Is it not possible that if you focus on, say, women's studies, that the average professor would view Democrats as rabid fascist wingnuts? Or that a reverse image of that seen with law professors would obtain when studying engineering professors? I think the belief that professors are largely Democrats is way too simplistic. Other than that, I think most (if not all) of the observations I've read here WRT professors are not too far off base.

And exactly who are all of these professors that are paid enough to have money to donate to politicans (of all people). For the fields in which there is an actual market for Ph.D.'s outside of academia, the nonacademics make a LOT more than their colleagues in academia. Wonder who they donate to.

They should do away with law professors and go back to having apprentices like they do in the plumbers union. Only a working lawyer should teach a newbie how to chase an ambulance. It would be so much more efficient.

I had good professors and bad; but I didn't study law, so I don't have much of an opinion on law professors.

But I think that gregq made a very good point at 6:15: How can professors of law almost universally support a party that believes that the constitution is essentially meaningless, to be interpreted not according to the meaning of its words, but according to what the reader wants it to mean, in the interest of his idea of fairness?

It's a little like Exxon executives supporting the Green Party. Why are these people law professors? It seems to me as though support of this sort of "fairness" interpretation implies contempt for the law.

I've had some great professors and one life-changing professor. It's a great gig. It's absolutely vital that we have good people to pass along information, foster and hone create critical thinking skills, and all that.

The problem is that the people who pass along the information and foster the skills aren't the best at using the information or the skills.

"" The problem, the former Clinton aide said, is that “they don’t have any attack dogs.”

"" “To address Palin, you need a prominent tough woman,” said another former aide. “I can’t think of any others who really work and who could really zing her with a smile on her face and look really good doing it.” ""

" a high ranking Obama staff member indicated to a Clinton counterpart that they would like Mrs. Clinton to take a more aggressive tack, and that the answer was no."

"The problem is that the people who pass along the information and foster the skills aren't the best at using the information or the skills."

That very much depends on the field in question. In my experience in my area, there is virtually no difference in the ability to apply the knowledge when comparing industry to academia. Yes, industry pays much better. But those who choose academia do so not because they have to, but for other reasons (and it's not always things like tenure, lifestyle, etc.; in most cases it's more about being able to do research on what you want, not what the company tells you to).

The second president under the constitution was a gifted lawyer, who had an abusive personality, and who was critically involved with writing the Declaration of Independence and also was our first VP! Lincoln was a good/gifted lawyer too.

What's interesting to me is that those two got their shingle the old fashioned way, reading for the law.

IMHO, law schools seem to muster out a predominance of mediocre persons; exceptions granted and especially those professors who teach law, not opinion or ideology.

I have several degrees to my name, I consider myself "cosmopolitan", which I think means you've eaten in a Vietnamese restaurant

If you live in a place like Houston, which has a huge Vietnamese community, even that doesn't mean you are cosmopolitan. Unless you are one of the rubes living in the outer burbs who think an Olive Garden is exotica, in which case, too bad for you.

All this having been said, a lot of conservative propaganda is geared towards demonizing terrible elitists (defined as those who eat arugula and send their kids to elite univerisities) who aren't tied to mainstream (mediocre) American culture. Why is it a surprise or something to be denied when liberals point out, yes, the further you go up the intellectual food chain, the more you vote Democratic, or to be more accurate, the more you support socially liberal policies and reject Evangelical conservative ideology? Isn't that the whole point, or rather, the whole internal contradiction, regarding social conservative class warfare rhetoric?

Oh, and by the way, Palladian, I am not calling you a rube. Far from it, I just used your comment as a jumping-off point. I am just pointing out the whole vulgar spectacle of calculated populism that is coming from the Right these days.

Ha! Just looking back at this I see I misspelled "universities". I guess that undermines my point. Not epic fail, but still a fail.

All that having been said, it still is an issue worth noting to me that it seems as though going to an elite college (particularly if you are a minority) is somehow not an "authentic American" background, while being a school-hopping mediocrity like Sarah Palin is "All-American", in political discussions.

Then again, that may be just because the discussions follow the expectations of the general public. In the words of Yoda, sad that is.

An elitist is someone who considers himself superior to "the masses". It has nothing to do with being rich. You can be dirt poor and be an elitist, as anyone who's ever hung out with grad students can testify.